page_title: Bucura Dumbravă
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Bucura Dumbravă / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Română: vârful Bucura Dumbravă (dreapta) și vârful Colțul Obârșiei (stânga)
context_page_description: Bucura Dumbravă, pen name of Ștefania "Fanny" Szekulics, Szekulicz or Seculici, was a Hungarian-born Romanian genre novelist, cultural promoter, hiker and Theosophist. Her literary work, mainly written in German, covers romantic stories about the legendary feats of hajduk heroes. They brought her commercial success in both German-speaking Europe and Romania, and were prefaced by Queen-consort Elisabeth of Wied.
  Dumbravă promoted many causes, and was involved with several cultural projects, but is mainly remembered for her activity in promoting tourism and environmentalism in Romania. She was an avid traveler and mountaineer, who established some of the country's first hiking clubs. Her travel writing remains a standard in Romanian literature, even though her fiction work is generally forgotten.
  Throughout most of her career, Szekulics promoted the inclusion of women in the Romanian Freemasonry. In old age, her essays came to focus on Spiritualist subjects, and, as disciple of Jiddu Krishnamurti, set up the Romanian lodge of the Theosophical Society. She died on her return trip from the British Raj, having attended the Theosophical Conference in Adyar.
context_section_description: Shortly after her death, Fanny Szekulics was honored with a memorial piece in Convorbiri Literare, signed by Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș, the art historian and courtier. Similarly, Țara Noastră journal assessed: "Her ashen hand [...] will find a good shelter in the soil of our country—a welcoming and loving mother to all those who understand her". The Bucura Dumbravă Peak, located in the Bucegi and identified by some with the sacred Kogaionon, was named in the writer's honor.
  Her last volume, grouping her letters, came out in 1927 as Pe drumurile Indiei. Cele din urmă pagini ("On India's Roads. The Very Last Pages"). Moreover, in 1928, Der Haiduck inspired a Romanian film, with Horia Igirosanu as director. Part of Szekulics' estate was passed on to Elena Râmniceanu and the Romanian Institute for Social Studies. It was set up as the annual Bucura Dumbravă Award for Ethics, and had as its first recipient Emanoil Bucuța. A "friends of Bucura Dumbravă" circle still reunited periodically in commemoration of her death, and, in 1934, published a tribute volume, Când trec anii ("As Years Pass").
  Her books went through several reprints, before, during, and after World War II, and inspired illustrations by woman artist Olga Greceanu. In 1942, Der Haiduck was used by C. N. Mihăilescu and Ion Șahighian as the basis for another feature film, Iancu Jianul.
  Despite being relatively famous in her lifetime, Bucura Dumbravă was generally ignored by later schools of literary criticism. As noted by Luiza Marinescu, "she was not included in neither Romanian literary histories nor German ones" (with the exception of Enciclopedia Cugetarea, 1940), and was disregarded for her presence on Queen Elisabeth's "camarilla". Writing in 1935, essayist Petru Comarnescu opined that Bucura Dumbravă's work had a "local" character, and was far less important than that of her modernist peers—Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Henriette Yvonne Stahl. Still, Perpessicius writes, Cartea munților survives as the "vade mecum of hiking".
  Authors were more interested in her adventurous life and her Theosophical ideas. Completed shortly after her death, the novel Craii de Curtea-Veche by Mateiu Caragiale makes a sarcastic reference to her as "the theosophist Papura Jilava", briefly seen dancing with the antagonist. As a mystic who died mysteriously, Szekulics is notably mentioned in Mircea Eliade's 1940 novella, Secretul doctorului Honigberger.
  After the establishment of a communist regime, Dumbravă's work, with its monarchist connections, was removed from the literary canon. In the Romanian diaspora, however, two more editions of her work were published (1954, 1956). At home, such reconsideration came in 1969, when historian Dumitru Almaș and Editura Tineretului republished Brătianu's 1912 translation; literary critic Mircea Handoca also put up a 1970 reprint of Cartea munților, at Editura Stadion. A ballet adaptation of Haiducul was also produced by the Romanian National Opera, followed in 1982 by another Iancu Jianu film, with Dinu Cocea as director and Adrian Pintea as the star actor.
  Still, biographical entries on her were scarcely found in specialty works until the Romanian Revolution of 1989, when she came to be mentioned in standardized writers' dictionaries. In 2011, cartoonist Vali Ivan relied on her Der Haiduck to draw a graphic novel about the times of Iancu Jianu.
caption: Bucura Dumbravă Peak, pictured on the right
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